Peter Swift’s job as a camp director requires him to spend a lot of time on his feet and moving. Beyond that, the 41-year-old from Trout Run, Pa., enjoys being active.
However, for nearly a year, severe arthritis in his hips made walking, hiking, and just moving in general painful. So, Peter visited John Bailey, MD, orthopaedic surgeon, UPMC in North Central Pa.
Dr. Bailey performed a hip replacement surgery on Peter’s left hip in June 2024. Later that year, Dr. Bailey replaced Peter’s right hip.
The two surgeries reduced Peter’s pain and allowed him to become active again.
“Within a few weeks, I was running around and playing with my kids again, and playing volleyball with my staff, or playing basketball with them and doing all the things I used to love to do,” Peter says. “It happened very quickly, and I’m very thankful for that.”
North Central Pa Ortho
A Painful Progression
Peter is the director of Camp Susque, a nondenominational Christian camp in Lycoming County in north central Pennsylvania. Camp Susque is open year-round, hosting summer and winter camps, harvest festivals, field trips, and more.
“It’s a constant buzz of activity here,” says Peter, who has worked at the camp since 2015.
Starting in his late 30s, Peter began to feel hip pain. The pain grew steadily worse over time, making tasks at work difficult.
“When you’re a camp director, there’s an expectation of a high level of activity,” Peter says. “There’s hiking. We have rock-climbing walls. We have a pool.
“We have all these things that I’m supposed to be leading activities in, and those activities became very painful. It was just very hard to do my job as I should.”
Peter tried nonsurgical treatment options like medication to treat his pain. He says these methods often would work for a time, but the pain always returned eventually.
The pain grew to the point where Peter says his wife needed to help him put his socks on each morning. And beyond his duties as camp director, he also couldn’t be as active as he wanted with his own three kids.
“Playing outside, playing baseball with my son, you want to bend over to pick up the baseball. That was a really painful activity for me,” Peter says. “Either I was in pain doing these activities, or I was avoiding them, both of which were not a good thing.”
A Surgical Solution
Peter’s primary care provider referred him to Dr. Bailey, the director of Adult Reconstructive Surgery at UPMC in North Central Pa.
“UPMC’s right in my backyard,” Peter says. “I’m familiar with a lot of the doctors and have had a lot of positive experiences with UPMC over the years, so going with Dr. Bailey was not a hard decision.
“He just seemed very knowledgeable, had a great plan of action, and he was very helpful.”
Dr. Bailey ordered imaging tests, which showed that Peter had arthritis in both hips. The left hip was in the worst shape, where bone was rubbing against bone.
“He had fairly severe arthritis, and it was from the typical wear and tear,” Dr. Bailey says.
With the condition of his hips, Peter was a candidate for hip replacement surgery. Recent advances in hip replacement surgery techniques have led to shorter recovery times and better overall outcomes.
Though hip replacements were once less common in people Peter’s age, modern hardware is more durable.
“It used to be that age was a significant factor because the hips would wear out,” Dr. Bailey says. “But with modern components … that is no longer the case. So at this point when patients need hip replacement, there’s really not an age barrier.”
Those factors made Peter a strong candidate for surgery.
A Rapid Recovery
Because of the severe pain his arthritis was causing, Peter wanted to get his hip replacement surgery done as soon as possible. Dr. Bailey operated on him in June 2024. He used a direct anterior approach, operating from the front of the leg instead of the back to limit damage to Peter’s soft tissue.
The timing of the surgery was tricky because summer is the busiest time at Camp Susque. But Peter says he felt an improvement in his hip almost immediately after waking up.
“I woke up feeling good and not in a lot of pain,” he says. “Every single person I encountered was friendly and concerned to make sure I was comfortable, whether it was an orderly bringing in some food or someone taking the trash out of my room. They all had the same very patient-focused attitude to make sure things were going well for me.”
Within hours after his surgery, Peter was up and walking through the halls at UPMC Williamsport. He was able to go home the next day and return to work at Camp Susque soon afterward. After eight weeks, he was cleared for full activity.
Peter says the fast recovery was “mind-boggling.”
“This is a very major surgery, literally cutting apart the biggest bone in your body, replacing it with titanium and plastic, and then hours later, using it and using it effectively, without pain,” he says. “It was incredible. Literally walking out of the hospital on a new hip and being able to use it immediately was a pretty tremendous thing for me.”
A Second Surgery
When Peter had his left hip replaced, he and Dr. Bailey decided to wait for the same procedure for his right hip. The right hip was in better shape than the left, so they hoped a full right hip replacement wouldn’t be necessary.
By the fall of 2024, it became clear to Peter that he would need his right hip replaced as well. Although he could move better, the right hip was still slowing him down.
“The other one was still wearing out and causing some issues with my lifestyle and being able to do all the things I wanted to do,” he says. “It made sense to get the other one replaced as well.”
Peter scheduled his second surgery for December 2024. He says the first procedure’s success gave him confidence for the second.
“Knowing how instantaneously better my life was when I got the left one done, I didn’t want to put the right one off,” he says.
The second surgery again went smoothly. Peter says he managed the pain even better after the second procedure. Once again, he had an eight-week recovery, and by February 2025, he was skiing with his kids.
Eight months after his second procedure, Peter is fully recovered. He’s noticed a major difference in his ability to stay active at home and at the camp.
“My range of motion is really high: way higher than pre-surgery, and even higher than years ago,” Peter says.
“It’s really great to have full use. I’ve been around the camp all summer, I’ve been swimming, hiking, and playing volleyball and basketball, all the things I like to do, with really no issues whatsoever. I’m very grateful to get them both done.”
Dr. Bailey says he enjoys seeing patients like Peter return to full activity without pain.
“We see people come in that have very severe pain, difficult getting around, and then they come back two months later and they’re getting around and back to all their activities,” he says. “Frequently, you see an actual change in their demeanor, their appearance. They go from being a little bit of a stressed look to a little more relaxed.”
Over a year since meeting Dr. Bailey, Peter says he’s thankful to the surgeon and his staff for the great care they provided.
Peter says he often hears people say that he’s too young to get a hip replacement. But he encourages younger people to consider hip replacement surgery if they’re in pain — whether they need one hip replaced or two.
“I would suggest to anyone, ‘Don’t give up the prime of your life to pain,'” Peter says. “There’s options out there that are not as scary and not as big of a deal as you might think.”
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on , and was last reviewed on .